Ripple, cryptocurrency XRP, is up 72% today, and it’s no surprise to anyone. It’s like the poster child for cryptocurrency price volatility. It goes up big, it goes down big, sometimes the same day. Usually, it’s price is moving based on good or bad news. That all creates issues when making a Ripple price forecast.

Highly Reactive Substance

What do you get when you take XRP and mix it with a healthy dose of good news? A Ripple price forecast that is twice whatever its current value is. Now, what happens when you mix it with any amount of bad news? A Ripple price forecast in the double digit negatives, usually around the 50-70% loss range. The price of XRP has, in 2018 alone, soared to $3.84, and dropped to under 90 cents. This is part of what makes it so hard to do a Ripple price forecast.

Yesterday, for example, the price started the day at $1.18, dropped to 89.7 cents but then ended the day at $1.31. Today, opened at $1.31, and sits at $1.70 nearly a 76% gain for the last 24 hours.

What’s the Deal?

Ripple is somewhat different than many other cryptocurrencies. It is centralized, because there is a single company behind it as opposed to the decentralized nature of most blockchain. It was specifically designed to be used by banks, as opposed to be a way around banks. Ripple was created as a global payment system, but was aimed at replacing the current bank-to-bank systems. The existing systems take 3-5 days just to send electronic cash from place to place. Ripple can do it in under 4 seconds. The current systems are expensive and that makes sending small amounts of money not worth it for the banks and financial institutions.

Ripple transactions cost mere cents as the cost is the destruction of a small piece of an XRP. Ripple was made to work with the system, Bitcoin developed as a way to work outside of the system. Ripple is about traceability, Bitcoin about anonymous currency movement. Ripple is enabling banks to transfer funds almost simultaneously. Bitcoin enables everyone to transfer funds almost simultaneously.

Why so Volatile?

A Ripple price forecast can be ugly and somewhat sporadic because of all of those reasons above. It acts more like a company on a stock exchange, but with the added highly speculative nature of cryptocurrency. It’s something of a hybrid. Bad news for Ripple means XRP price drops, fast. So when South Korea said they might ban cryptocurrencies, it looked like an entire national market might be off limits to Ripple, boom, XRP drops. Japanese credit cards form a consortium and decide to look into Ripple as an immediate payment system, boom, XRP price rockets.

Ripple’s Actual Value?

Many long term cryptocurrency investors won’t touch it, because the actual value of the coin is hard to calculate. Some day traders use it for quick profit turns. When bad news hits, the price sinks, they buy. Then, over the course of the day, it will regain some of its value, usually. Say it grows 20% over the course of the day from it’s low point, that’s a pretty good return on investment for a single day. Nab $1,000 worth of XRP in early morning at a buck each, sell later in the day at $1.20-1.30 for $1,200-1,300. Granted, that may not be a totally accurate example of a day trader day, but it is what has been happening with Ripple. If one could get ahead of the news cycle somehow, they might be able to make an accurate Ripple price forecast.

Ripple in 2018

Eight of the first seventeen days of 2018 have seen Ripple rise from open to close. Bitcoin, in the same range, had ten days of gains. Bitcoin lost $2,923.60 in value from January 1^st through the 17^th, that’s almost 21% loss. Ripple is down 43% in the same period, but it has only lost 99 cents of value. So at first glance it looks like Bitcoin is doing terribly, when in fact it’s only lost about half as much as Ripple. That’s what makes trying to do a Ripple price forecast so difficult. Additionally, across exchanges the price varies wildly. At time of writing it was trading for $2,45 on Bitflip, but just $1.23 on Gatehub.

Another major fluctuation that makes Ripple price forecasting tough is the daily volume. Just this week alone daily volume has ranged from $1.8B to $7.25B a fourfold change. Bitcoin daily volume as been between $11B and $19B, less than double the difference.

So What is it?

What is the Ripple price forecast? That’s probably what you are looking for. It depends on a variety of factors, like will they achieve major market penetration and become the default immediate payment system? Will they nab a major piece of American finance payments? That would certainly send the price soaring. In fact, there is a US task force, the Federal Reserve System’s Faster Payments Task Force. Ripple is a US-based company, headquartered in San Francisco, California. With the current trend of America first, who is the Federal Reserve most likely to turn to for help? An American company. Investors in Ripple include names like Google Ventures, Seagate, Andreesen Horowitz, and Accenture. The current CEO is formerly of AOL, and Yahoo! The board of directors include credentials from places like Morgan Stanley, CNN, Harvard, and a former National Economic Council Director for two Presidents.

Regardless of how crypto markets move, Ripple might be poised to ride a high tide of financial institution adoption of its fast payments system. That could send the price well past the previous high of $3.84. At time of writing, XRP is up 65.43% for the past 24 hours according to Coinmarketcap.com. Maybe it’s time to buy into its hype for a long hold? Or use it to generate some profits in the near future?